World War I
|image =pic-674373.jpg |caption = Battle of the Somme (1916) |date = 28 July 1914 - 11 November 1918 (4 years, 3 months and 2 weeks) |location = Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, China, Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Earth |result = |side1 = United Kingdom France Russia United States of America Japan Italy Serbia Canada Australia New Zealand |side2 = Germany Austria-Hungary Ottoman Empire Bulgaria |strength1 = Around 42 Million Military Personnel |strength2 = Around 25 Million Military Personnel |leader1 = Raymond Poincaré, Georges Clemenceau, H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, King Albert I, Tsar Nicholas II, Alexander Kerensky, King Victor Emmanuel III, Vittorio Orlando, President Woodrow Wilson, Emperor Yoshihito, King Peter I, King Ferdinand I, Eleftherios Venizelos |leader2 = Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor/King Franz Joseph I, Emperor/King Karl I, Sultan Mehmed V, Sultan Mehmed VI, Three Pashas, Tsar Ferdinand I |bts = }} World War I, also known as the 1914-18 War was a major conflict on Earth fought over four years, three months and two weeks from 1914 to 1918. It was referred to as "the War to End All Wars", or "the War to End Wars". Millions of people — men, women and children — lost their lives in the war. Sometimes 20,000 soldiers were killed in a single day, and a battle for six miles of wasteland could cost lives of 1,500,000 men. Battlefields of World War I were considered perfect hunting grounds by Weeping Angels. Foreseeing In 1903, after receiving a wealth of information from the future, Grigori Rasputin foresaw the Great War. The time travelling Family of Blood, while in 1913, warned some people there would be a war the next year. Origin It was caused in part by the influence of the Nemesis statue passing by Earth in 1913. However, the ostensible reason was that a Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914. Austria issued a list of demands to Serbia, which were rejected. In response, Austria prepared to invade Serbia. Russia was allied to Serbia and started mobilising its troops. Knowing that France was also allied to Serbia, Germany, which was itself allied to Austria, decided to attack France first because France wanted the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine back. In order to do that, Germans had to march through Luxembourg and Belgium. However, the United Kingdom had a treaty to protect Belgium. Thus, most of the major powers were pulled into the war, and the others soon chose a side too. At one point, the Eleventh Doctor grew fearful as he began to suspect that the Daleks had conditioned Princip to commit the assassination so humanity would be plunged into war, allowing the Daleks to make advancements with the Dalek Project. Yet the Doctor ultimately never found any conclusive evidence to confirm his suspicions and conceded that it was only a possibility. The War The United Kingdom did not engage in combat until the end of August 1914. Some of the battlegrounds were Mons, Passchendaele, the Somme, Verdun, Tannenberg and Ypres. A million British soldiers died during the war. On Christmas Day 1914, a festive truce was called and soldiers on both sides participated in football matches in no-man's land. They also conversed and shared cigarettes. The celebrations were witnessed by the First Doctor, Steven Taylor, and Sara Kingdom; the Fifth Doctor and Peri Brown; the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; the First Doctor a second time and the Twelfth Doctor. The next day, soldiers resumed fighting. On 7 May 1915, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania RMS Lusitania] was torpedoed by the German U-boat and sank, precipitating the entry of the United States of America into the war two years later. In 1915, Wilfred Hollins was killed in the war. In July 1916, the British Army began a massive offensive in the Somme. It was later called the First Battle of the Somme or simply the "Big Push". The attacks were happening simultaneously along miles of trenches. Jamie Colquhoun and his regiment took part in the offensive. So did Captain Richard Hadleman and his Ninth battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. In 1917, George Newman fought on the Italian front. The immortal Jack Harkness fought in the war in the British Army, as did Tim Latimer, Hutchinson and Major Burton. Tommy Brockless also served, and was eventually executed in 1918 when, suffering from shell shock, he refused to return to the front lines. Solomon and the older members of his Hooverville fought in the American army during the war as did Diagoras. By 1917, most young men in England had been drafted. The android Edwin Bracewell had memories of the War implanted in his positronic brain. The Eleventh Doctor speculated that these were someone else's memories. The Forge ran at least two experiments for the war effort: trying to create vampire soldiers in 1915 and trying to brainwash soldiers into being more aggressive in 1917. A number of British and German soldiers were kidnapped by the War Lords for their War Games, fighting in a replica of the Western Front. The Second Doctor, believing the "1917 Zone" was the real conflict, called it "one of the worst wars in human history". The soldiers were eventually returned home to Earth by the Time Lords. 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, marked the end of the war. A conference was held at Versailles in 1919 for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Under the terms of the treaty, Germany lost all of her colonies, much of her European territory and was made to accept responsibility for the war. The Doctor and the War The First Doctor, along with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, survived a Zeppelin air raid. The First Doctor also witnessed the Battle of Passchendaele and considered it an awful event. In 1914, the Third Doctor, Tobias Philby and Thomas ended up in a No Man's Land in France, where they learned of a German artillery build-up and warned the British Army of it. The Seventh Doctor, travelling with Ace and Hex, was drawn to the Forge's experiments at Charnage Hospital in 1917 and thwarted them. On another occasion, he offered one private the opportunity to travel with him but the man declined. The Ninth Doctor visited at Christmas, 1914 with Rose Tyler. He started the football game between the opposing troops taking part in the Christmas truce. The Fifth Doctor also visited a battlefield during the Christmas truce, during which he met Edward Woodbourne. On Christmas 1914 in Ypres, Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart entered into a standoff with a German soldier that would ultimately cost them both their lives. However, Archibald was briefly extracted by the Testimony to copy his memories, but an error in the timeline caused Archibald to end up in Antarctica in 1986 near the First Doctor and Twelfth Doctor. The two Doctors attempted to save Archibald from the Testimony before understanding its true purpose. Ultimately, Archibald was returned to his own time, but the Twelfth Doctor adjusted the time periods for the two soldiers ahead by a couple of hours. As a result, their standoff ended with neither man dying when the Christmas truce began shortly after time resumed. Seeing his future self's actions caused the First Doctor to understand what "the Doctor of War" really was and decide to go forth with his regeneration. The Tenth Doctor and Rose visited the war again and put a stop to the Warfreekz' observation of the battles. The Tenth Doctor encountered the Weeping Angels in the town of St Michel. The Eleventh Doctor arrived at Hellcombe Hall in 1917 where, with help from Corporal Edward Anderson and Lord Hellcombe, he learned about the Dalek Project. He managed to help the Allied and German armies defeat the Daleks and their robotic drones before all witnesses to the Dalek plan could be exterminated. Aftermath In the aftermath of the war, certain women over thirty in the United Kingdom gained the right to vote. After the war, an influenza pandemic raged across the world. The Ice Warriors had released the virus to weaken humanity and allow them to invade. The virus killed the Ice Warriors instead. The war was followed relatively quickly by World War II which began on 1 September 1939, This war had its roots in World War I and its aftermath, with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party defying the Treaty of Versailles in order to regain much of Germany's lost territories such as the Rhineland. In the aftermath, the "Kingdom of Iraq" was formed. Tommy Brockless, a shell-shocked WWI soldier who had been put in the care of Torchwood and preserved in hibernation until the 21st century, was saddened about the Iraq War, since he had been told that this one was "The War to End All Wars." He was eventually returned to his original time period through the Cardiff Rift, completing a stable time loop that required him to survive until the 21st century. Unfortunately, once he returned to 1918, his memories reverted to their original state, and all his old fears of the battlefield returned. Brockless would be shot down by a British firing squad three weeks later for displaying cowardice. When Ben Jackson told him about the First World War in November 1920, Jamie McCrimmon initially assumed that it was fought against aliens. In 2017, some archaeologists came across the crashed Dalek saucer Survey Ship Sigma in France, one hundred years after it had crashed following the failure of the Dalek Project, and accidentally revived the surviving Daleks inside. The Eleventh Doctor arrived just in time to prevent a disaster and connected the saucer to a power line, overloading the Daleks. He saw this as him dealing with "unfinished business". Category:Conflicts